Unreal Engine 5 Temporal Super Resolution promises "4K at the cost of 1080p"

Epic Games released a demo of Unreal Engine 5 today, and one key feature is creating quite a buzz among developers and gamers alike. Temporal Super Resolution (TSR) is a new anti-aliasing feature that many see as an upscaling feature.

According to Epic, TSR should “create sharper, more stable images than before with quality approaching true native 4K at the cost of 1080p.” Essentially, TSR improves how a PC tracks geometry and lighting without heavily impacting framerates. The result is similar to Nvidia’s DLSS in that TSR serves as an anti-aliasing feature but can also upscale models and generally smooth out graphical hiccups.

The big draw is improved graphical fidelity without the hit to frame rates. In a demo from Epic, a scene rendered at native 4K hit 18.57 FPS. The same scene rendered at 1080p through TSR averaged 43.02 FPS with a similar level of graphical fidelity. Sure, the 1080p scene isn’t as clean or sharp as the native 4K scene, but it’s noticeably better than a 1080p scene without TSR or any kind of upscaling.

Other features of TSR include ghosting reduction, reduced flickering on complex geometry, and other graphical output quality improvements.

Unreal Engine 5 is compatible with DirectX 11, DirectX 12, Vulkan, and the AMD RDNA 2 architecture used by the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Epic says that support for Apple’s Metal graphical API is coming soon.

Unreal Engine 5 is currently only available as a demo. The full release is slotted for early 2022.

What do you think of Unreal Engine 5? Let us know in the comments. 

Buy a book to learn C++ and Unreal Engine at Amazon.